by Theo Padnos
Sinking into their armchairs, Abu Said and Abu Osama retrieved their mobile phones from their pockets. They scrolled. They tapped out messages. I scrutinized their faces. Were they really brothers? Perhaps they are brothers in the “brothers-of-the-faith” sense of brotherhood, I thought. They might have been cousins.
Fifteen minutes passed. Why had we come to this apartment? Who lived here? Why were they sinking away into their phones? I had been under the impression that we were striking out on adventure into Syria. In fact, a pair of postadolescent couch surfers were mesmerizing themselves with their cell phones in their parents’ living room.
Another five minutes passed. Abu Said rose. Without saying a word, he disappeared into an interior room. He returned ten minutes later. He sat in his armchair. Then Abu Osama rose. He disappeared behind the same door.
They are having lunch with their mom and their sisters, I told myself. They are embarrassed that they cannot invite me into the women’s sphere. They don’t know how to make their apologies and are not considerate enough to bring me a plate, and so they say nothing. Perhaps, I thought, I could find a sandwich in Reyhanli.
I yawned. So the smugglers make their contraband run during the daytime, I explained to myself, then come home to Mom and Dad at night. Mom and Dad, I guessed, hardly belonged to the normal run of Syrian refugee families. They had the money to rent a Turkish apartment I couldn’t have dreamed of. The wireless internet, the satellite television, the carpets: The occupants of this apartment had been business owners or teachers or civil servants before the violence in Syria drove them into Turkey. They had taken an apartment directly on the Syrian border because they meant to hurry home at the earliest opportunity.
Pillars of the community such as the mom and dad in whose living room I was lounging would not have approved if they had known that their sons were making their money by running goods across the Syrian border. If the sons were to introduce me to their parents, the parents would almost certainly suss out an impending voyage into Syria. The father would be courteous with me, then turn to his sons: “What business have you with this American in Syria?”
An interrogation along these lines could end our trip before it began. Fine, I thought, I shall not pry. If a fatherlike person appears, I thought, I will keep my mouth shut. In the meantime, I wanted to waken my traveling companions from their slumber. I wanted them to understand that our voyage into Syria was no casual, local errand but a project that might easily lead us into mortal danger.
“The two reporters,” I said rudely, in the midst of their silence. “The two who were imprisoned near here a few weeks ago. You’ve heard of them?” My friends had not heard of these reporters.
One was a Dutch photographer and the other a British writer, I explained. I pointed toward a line of Syrian pines on a ridge outside the window. “A band of extremists took them prisoner in a forest. Right here,” I said. The incident had played out over several days. The journalists had emerged in good condition, but only after a foiled escape attempt, and only then after the Free Syrian Army fought its way into the extremists’ encampment. During the skirmish that preceded the journalists’ liberation, several of the extremists, including their leader, I explained, had been killed.
“Really?” said Abu Said, barely lifting an eyebrow. He asked for the names of the journalists. I looked them up online. No, he had not heard of them. And the name of the katiba that took the journalists into custody? I searched further, but the militants had had no name, apparently, at least not one I could turn up. The brothers frowned. They returned to their phones. There were angry birds to be dispatched and candies to be crushed. So bands of extremists were trampling around in the forest a few hundred meters from where we sat, the bands had hijacked people quite like me, the hijacking had turned into an international incident, and my traveling companions, on learning this news, could not be bothered to lift their eyes from their phones.
How addicted we’ve become to our devices, I told myself, and how totally these wicked machines keep us from seeing what’s going on under our noses. I decided I had better take a walk.
I announced my intention. The brothers looked at each other. “To where?” Abu Osama wanted to know. “Why?” He volunteered to accompany me. I wanted to be alone. I told him this. He consulted his watch. “We’ll be leaving here in fifteen minutes. You can be back then?”
“Of course,” I said. At first, stepping out of the apartment, I worried these dour, incommunicative brothers might leave without me, but when I was a hundred meters from them—when their silences and half sentences were no longer annoying me—a dread more powerful than any I had encountered during all previous voyages to Syria washed over me. I ignored it, but the feeling did not go away. The first cold winds of winter were whistling through the trees. No other humans were about.
As soon as I am on the far side of the border, I thought, I will be among people who do not know me or like me, in a war zone, without a working cell phone. I turned my eyes toward the sky over Syria. A bank of heavy clouds hung over low, forested hills. I imagined plumes of mushroom clouds rising from the earth, merging into the cloud bank, then dissolving themselves in the autumnal gray. Perhaps the clouds I was looking at were rather more made up of dissipated explosion smoke than cloud. It was certainly possible. How was one meant to tell the difference between explosion smoke and cloud? I pondered this mystery for a moment. For what reason exactly, I wondered, did I mean to take myself into those killing fields?
I decided that Abu Osama and his brother—or cousin or whatever he was—Abu Said were too silent and too furtive to make the trip enjoyable. The friendlier, baseball-cap-wearing Mohammed had vanished. Good riddance to him, I thought.
In my mind’s eye I saw the brothers driving me to a lonely spot on the high plains, north of Aleppo. They would provoke an argument. One of them would insist on my paying hundreds of dollars. Had they not guided me across an international border? Had they not imperiled their lives in doing so? They would demand $300 in cash. I would refuse. And so they would leave me by the side of the road, as bandit taxi drivers in Syria sometimes do.
Or perhaps they would invite me to witness some episode of brutality I did not want to witness. This lot of Syrians would be murdering that lot. I would refuse to witness it, whatever it was. We would argue, they would insist, I would give in, and then, when we had arrived at their “safe” observation post, some bit of twisted metal would fly through the air, lodge in my kneecap, and maim me for life.
I knew what the other reporters would say: “Really had no business being in Syria at all, did he?”
“Probably thought of himself as a bit of a cowboy.”
“He’s gonna be a one-legged cowboy from now on.” And so on. What a useless lot those correspondents were. I longed for providence to arrange for me to meet one or two of them by chance, in a sandwich shop, for instance, or in a collective taxi. I had read the twaddle they published under their editors’ gentlemanly headings: “A Letter from Syria” and “A Reporter’s Notebook” and “The Aleppo Scene.” Most of it was hogwash. I had yet to meet one of these charlatans in person. If chance were to present me with such a meeting, I decided, I wouldn’t waste time being polite. I would give the nonentity in front of me a piece of my mind. Why not? Those people deserved much worse.
It occurred to me that I could catch a return bus to Antakya. It would have me back in Ashraf’s hovel within the hour. I had my computer there and a pink faux-fur bedspread. Ashraf would appear in the evening. The two of us would drink a beer together, then sleep, and in the morning new safer, wiser career projects would come to me.
At the bus station—a parking lot on a side street strewn with blowing trash—I learned that the bus for Antakya had left minutes earlier. The next one would come in an hour. Or maybe two? The man to whom I put my questions was himself a stranger in Antakya. “Only God knows,” he said in Arabic. He cast a mournful glance toward the sky over Antakya, then lowered his head,
then shuffled away into the wind.
I will make my apologies to my new friends, I told myself as I ambled back to my kidnappers’ parents’ apartment. I will bow out and slink away. I walked for a few meters, lost track of where exactly the apartment was, retraced my steps, and as I searched out the lanes that led to their apartment my resolve disintegrated.
It had taken me weeks to settle on suitable traveling companions. The ones I had found were certainly sullen. But their price was right. Anyway, I had cast my lot with them. To change up my plan now would have been to allow my life to be ruled by whimsy and precognition and flights of the spirit.
It was true that these young men had yet to warm up to me. I hadn’t warmed to them. And so? In Syria, there would be travel and interviews with actual citizens. In other words, there would be work. Was I afraid of work? I was not. If Abu Osama and Abu Said proved too somnolent or too disagreeable to travel with or wished to bring me into places in which I did not feel safe, I would make my apologies. I would walk away. I had a job to do. Perhaps, when way led on to way, my traveling companions would let me in on their secret. Perhaps then we could be proper friends. Or not. Anyway, I would be back in Antakya on Monday, my notebooks filled with chance remarks, the exact wording of roadside signs, snippets of song, the prices of things, lists of what I had eaten, and transcriptions of what was said in the prayers. In Syria, all such things were as free as the air. In Turkey, in the comfort of the hovel, I would spin them, in my own good time, under the faux fur, if not into gold, exactly, then certainly into $200.
Abu Osama answered the doorbell. “Hurry,” he said. The driver had arrived. “Get your things,” Abu Osama said. “Now.” I was to put them in the trunk of the Oldsmobile that had appeared in front of the apartment. I was to climb into the back seat of the car.
The driver brought us to a dirt road about five minutes outside of the village. To the south, a line of Turkish watchtowers stood over recently plowed fields. We bobbed down the dirt road. Presently we came to a break in the line of watchtowers. We could see the turrets of the nearby towers, but they were tiny eagles’ nests atop distant pylons. The driver made a sudden turn into the dirt and then gunned the engine. We roared through the furrows, as in a car chase scene, then jolted to a stop in front of a roll of barbed wire. Abu Osama stuffed a pile of Syrian liras into the driver’s face. The driver tossed them to his dashboard. “Hurry,” he whispered. “The Turks. Run!”
It occurred to me that Abu Osama was paying for me to be smuggled into Syria. How gallant of him, I thought, as I seized my backpack from the Oldsmobile’s trunk. I resolved to return the favor by proving an agreeable, uncomplaining traveling companion. In those moments, I knew, he required me to run. Running I could do. I picked my way through a weakened, trampled-down portion of the barbed-wire roll. I turned to glance backward into Turkey. I paused for an instant, then set out at a healthy pace, as if in an important race at home.
As I ran, I kept my eyes on a line of olive trees on the horizon, a kilometer or so distant. Over there, it seemed to me, the nation whose language I could speak, whose villagers had plied me with tea in the past, beds for the night, and, now and then, beseeched me to marry their daughters, was urging me to run faster. It would take me in, I knew. Every instant of life in that country, I felt, was rich in interpretative possibility. When I was there, I was rich, too.
So I flew through the field. I left my fellow travelers as if they had been standing still. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Abu Osama’s Santa Claus sack of smuggler’s booty was causing him to stagger through the dirt. He stumbled forward, rested his sack in the dirt, hoisted it over his shoulder again, then carried on with his stumbling. What clumsy, slow-witted smugglers I had happened across. They were suited to balcony idling and to languorous tea chat. Such dead weight I had brought with me. Why had I bothered?
On the far side of the field, as the olive grove approached, I slowed to a jog. My mood improved as I approached the safety of the Syrian trees. In the past, I had spent hundreds of dollars and countless hours worrying over my Syria visa applications. Now the ease with which I had waltzed into Syria struck me with the force of a revelation. Why had I troubled myself so? Indeed, why did anybody bother with visas and passports and the like at all? In order to arrive in the desired country, it seemed to me, one slipped into an Oldsmobile. One went scampering away through the dirt. Then came the olive trees. Then came the brand-new life. The reason the common herd insisted on respecting every border regulation in every corner of the world, I decided, was that lines on maps appeared to unthinking people as though they, the lines, had descended from heaven. In fact, bureaucrats in London had plotted them out in bygone centuries. Smugglers, refugees, explorers, and journalists in pursuit of truth, as I was, understood that life does not conform to the notions those long-gone officials entertained about who should go where, for what reasons.
Perhaps I’ll apply for a visa when I’m old, I told myself, or out of courtesy for the men and women who work so dutifully at their borders. Henceforth, I decided, whenever visa regulations annoyed me, I would pursue the many alternative routes to which imaginative travelers repaired when officialdom blocked their way.
For a few moments, in the safety of the Syrian olive grove, revivifying thoughts along these lines came to me. I watched Abu Osama and Abu Said stagger under the weight of their backpacks. Whatever they were smuggling into Syria was causing them to weave and stumble like drunkards.
I turned my eyes to a pair of olive pickers. They were propping a ladder against a tree trunk. I approached one, spoke friendly words to him, listened to the pretty Arabic words of welcome he spoke, and felt that I was coming home. A few minutes later, when Abu Said and Abu Osama had joined me, the three of us sat under an ancient, gnarled olive tree, smiling at one another and glancing backward toward the unsafety of the Turkish watchtowers. So far, so good. Presently, a man with a handgun dangling from a shoulder holster appeared, welcomed us with a string of God-saturated phrases, as is common in Syria, then directed us down a dirt path.
The ease by which arrangements of this sort in Syria are made made me feel free. Our success at the border crossing made me feel free. We walked for ten minutes or so. At a roundabout at the edge of this olive grove, Mohammed, the red-capped lounger who had failed to appear at the orange juice restaurant in the morning, was waiting behind the wheel of a yellow-and-white Syrian taxi. Now he wore a crumpled fedora. During his wait, he had lowered the brim of his hat over his eyes, propped his feet on the dash, then fallen, so it seemed, sound asleep. The sound of our voices in the air as we approached the car did not wake him. The sound of my hand on the door handle hardly stirred him. Surely, he was striking a pose? Opening the car door, I understood: He was indeed pretending to be an idle cabbie, waiting for a fare, napping the afternoon away. It just so happened that this cabbie had decided to fall asleep in the middle of nowhere, by the side of an olive grove. It just so happened that we, the weary travelers, laden with bags, needed a ride. What good fortune! What serendipity. It was in this mood of wanting to have understood Mohammed’s joke, and wanting to be in on it with him, that I slipped into the passenger seat.
We exchanged greetings. As we salaamed, I noticed that his windshield had been cracked into a panorama of spiderwebs. A screwdriver had been plunged into the car’s ignition.
So he took a shambolic approach to car maintenance. Had I been a citizen-journalist in a war zone, I, too, I thought, would have been happy to drive anything that moved. I smiled at him. He smiled back. “Nice ride,” I said.
“You like it?” he said.
“Very much,” I said. I asked him, as is sometimes polite in Syria, how much his car cost and whether he would be willing to sell it to me.
“For you, of course,” he said, smiling, “it will be free.”
This made me smile. We shook hands over our fake deal. We waited for the others to stuff their belongings into the trunk, and then to lash the trunk to th
e body of the car with a strand of twine. The dilapidated state of their car made me smile. Abu Said and Abu Osama greeted Mohammed with great ardor, as if they hadn’t seen him for months. This, too, made me smile. We were all old friends, it seemed, about to embark on a road trip in a jalopy, through the freedom of rebel-held Syria. As Mohammed slipped the car into gear, I allowed myself to feel the freedom all travelers feel at the outset of an adventure that is to occur in a beguiling countryside, among friends.
Mohammed, I noticed, was an attentive, rule-respecting driver. He drove as if we were in a driver’s ed class. He held his hands on the wheel at eleven and one. He fixed his eyes like lasers on the surface of the road. I guessed that he hadn’t had much experience as a driver. “You drive very well, my friend,” I told him. He grinned. He did not take his eyes from the road. His seriousness at the wheel—or maybe it was the quiet that descended over the passengers in the back seat once we were in motion—reminded me that we were now in a country at war. Perhaps the Syrian government’s helicopters were inclined to target rebel taxis. Such an attack, I knew, couldn’t be ruled out. The reason for the somberness that crept over us in those moments, I decided, was that death, in this part of Syria, might come rocketing out of the sky at any moment. My fellow travelers understood this. By their silence, they were giving the situation the respect it was due. Other travelers, elsewhere on Earth, didn’t have to think about attack helicopters or IEDs in the roadway. We didn’t have this luxury, knew it, and so meant to travel in a silence appropriate to the gravity of the situation. This, I decided, was quite as it should be.
Presently, we rolled through the village of Atme. Atme subsequently became famous for the sprawling refugee camp that established itself on a hillside outside of town. Even then, when the encampment was just a few hundred tents, Atme was overrun. In the village, by the side of the road, refugee families sat on the curbside, waiting like lost luggage. A line of male travelers was filing through the center of the town on foot. Luckier, larger groups had piled themselves onto mattresses, which were strapped to the backs of flatbed trucks. Other families carried their belongings on taxi roofs and, now and then, lashed to the backs of motorcycles. One man had tucked his three infants into a wheelbarrow. He wheeled them along the village high street as if he were carrying a load of potatoes to market.
